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"The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. . . ."

Extract: JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN

New York Times Published: February 10, 2012

He was blind in one eye and couldn't
see especially well out of the other, wore dark-framed, vaguely
government-issue glasses, but they're lowered, he's turning his head and
squinting over the top of them. He reads from "The Portable James Joyce," my mother's Penguin paperback from college.
He's holding it close to his face. me the famous last paragraph,
"The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. . . ."
Nothing of the actual language remained with me, except, years later,
reading the story at school, there was something like déjà vu at the
part where Joyce first says the snow was "falling faintly," then four
words later says it was, "faintly falling." The slight
overconspicuousness of that had stuck, as I suppose he intended.